You’d have to be living in a cave to not have heard about the global credit crunch that’s going on right now. Here in the UK, the housing market, banking and investment sectors have been hit with a gigantic sledge hammer and shares have plunged on the stock market.

With that in mind, after seeing the markets crash I decided on a course of action to make my cash work a bit harder, so I took a measly £500 and bought a few random stocks.

Now, I know absolutely nothing about share dealing. Let me repeat, I know NOTHING about share dealing, but oddly enough I do have a share dealing account that I’d never used set up. So feeling brave I went for it.

Now most of the articles on share dealing I’ve read have stated that you should do your ‘due diligence’ on the companies you buy stocks in. Also, it said that in a ‘bear’ market it is very difficult to know when a stock has hit bottom, meaning you could get stung.

I can’t be bothered with this due diligence nonsense, mainly because I wouldn’t know a good stock one way or another, so initially I am going to cross my fingers, spin the wheel of fortune and just pick something.

Randomly I’ve gone for £150 each in:

Woolworths
Taylor Wimpy
Inchcape

Let the craziness begin!

I’m finding the rat-race fairly depressing at the moment, the constant travelling two and from work (two hours each way) is starting to get me down a little. Winter is coming and that means getting up in the dark and arriving back at home in the dark…  I guess we’d all like to escape from the humdrum and do something a little less mundane. However, once you get to a certain age you gather ‘anchors’ that stop you from just giving it all up, quitting the day job and escaping. Currently the big anchor that is weighing me down is the £200,000 mortgage outstanding on my house. Lately I’ve been thinking that one of the most important things that I can do right now is work towards paying that outstanding debt off as quickly as possible. I’m fairly sure that there aren’t any ‘real’ get rich quick schemes out there, so I’ll have to resort to wise financial investments and extra work on top of my day job to get myself into a positive financial position. There will be some risks involved, but in reality for the majority of us, there aren’t any quick fixes.